In certain parts of the country, it is the Company’s policy to destroy them along the whole frontier; and our general instructions recommend that every effort be made to lay waste the country, so as to offer no inducement to petty traders to encroach on the Company’s limits.  Those instructions have indeed had the effect of ruining the country, but not of protecting the Company’s domains.  Along the Canadian frontier, the Indians, finding no more game on their own lands, push beyond the boundary, and not only hunt on the Company’s territory, but carry a supply of goods with them, which they trade with the natives.  Their Honours’ fiat has also nearly swept away the fur animals on the west side of the Rocky Mountains; yet I doubt whether all this precaution will ensure the integrity of their domains.  The Americans have taken possession of the Columbia, and will speedily multiply and increase:  ere many years their trappers will be found scouring the interior, from the banks of the Columbia to New Caledonia, and probably penetrating to the east side of the Rocky Mountains.  Should they do so, that valuable part of the country embraced by the Peace and McKenzie Rivers would soon be ruined; for the white trapper makes a clean sweep wherever he goes.  Taking all these circumstances into consideration, I do not see any great probability—­to say the least—­that the trade will ever attain the prosperity of days bygone.

Even in such parts of the country as the Company endeavour to preserve, both the fur-bearing and larger animals have of late become so scarce, that some tribes are under the necessity of quitting their usual hunting-grounds.  A certain gentleman, in charge of a district to which some of those Indians withdrew, on being censured for harbouring them in his vicinity, writes thus:—­“Pray, is it surprising, that poor Indians, whose lives are in jeopardy, should relish a taste of buffalo meat?  It is not the Chippewayans alone that leave their lands to go in search of food to preserve their lives; the Strongwood Crees and Assineboines are all out in the plains, because, as they affirm, their usual hunting-grounds are so exhausted that they cannot live upon them.  It is no wish of mine that those Indians should visit us—­we have trouble enough with our own,—­but to turn a poor Indian out of doors, who arrives at the Company’s establishment nearly dead with hunger, is what I am not able to do.”

In the work already quoted I find it stated “that the Company have carefully nursed the various animals, removing their stations from the various districts where they had become scarce, and taking particular care to preserve the female while pregnant! instead, therefore, of being in a state of diminution, as generally supposed, the produce is increasing throughout their domains.”  Fudge!  It is unnecessary to say, that if this statement were correct, we should not hear such distressing accounts of starvation throughout the country.  No people can be more attached to their native soil than the Indians; and it is only the most pressing necessity that ever compels them to remove.